1944

by Jay Winik

  “Now, this is not the end,” Churchill said to the British people. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning!”

  ON DECEMBER 13, 1942, the rich baritone voice of Edward R. Murrow came over the air on a CBS radio broadcast. Even with the static crackling as the transmission lines carried his words over an ocean, listeners could sense the drama when he began: “This . . . is London.” Millions of Americans were glued to their radios as Murrow uttered these words—“What is happening is this: millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered. . . . The phrase ‘concentration camp’ is obsolete, as out of date as ‘economic sanctions’ or ‘nonrecognition.’ It is now possible to speak only of extermination camps.”

  The terrible secret, for anyone who wanted to listen, was a secret no more.

  ON DECEMBER 31, 1942, unlike the year before, Roosevelt’s New Year’s Eve at the White House was a festive occasion. There were cocktails and friends and family. There was dinner and a private screening of the movie Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart. There was good cheer. Just before the clock struck midnight, and as 1943 was about to begin, the president and his guests assembled in his second-floor study. Champagne was served. Roosevelt lifted his glass and offered his usual toast: “To the United States of America!”

  Then, at Roosevelt’s suggestion, drinks were raised once more. This time the president delivered a new encomium for the postwar world: “The United Nations!”

  11

  1943

  BERLIN AT THE START of 1943 was quiet. On several fronts, from Africa to the Soviet Union, German forces were under attack, their gains were being reversed, and their casualty lists, already long, lengthening. But in the capital, for the moment no air raid sirens split the air; there were no whistles as the Allied bombs descended from the night sky, and no shuddering, thunderous explosions below. The antiaircraft guns lay silent. Flak did not go up and then rain down again. The streets were clear of debris; the bunkers were unused. It was the calm before the storm. And the German high command knew it. The Nazis would soon dispatch Joseph Goebbels, chief propaganda minister, to the Berlin Sportpalast, a huge arena in one of the city’s southern suburbs. Standing in for the increasingly reclusive Hitler, Goebbels would speak before a handpicked crowd, surrounded by a raft of garlands and Nazi banners, while an ingenious loudspeaker system piped in recordings of ovations and cheers—the Nazi propagandists’ equivalent of a comedy laugh track. Above the dais hung a banner that read: “Total War—Shortest War.” This was what Goebbels had come to sell.

  Gesturing, sometimes shaking his fist, sometimes placing his hands on and off his hips, Goebbels employed every oratorical trick. When volume was needed, his voice boomed. When he sensed a slight loss of attentiveness, he lowered his tone, forcing the audience to listen closely for every word. His message was uncommonly frank: bars and nightclubs would be shut down, luxury stores, beauty salons, and high-end restaurants would be closed. “We can become gourmets once again, when the war is over,” he said. “Thrift” and “austerity” were the new watchwords. Then came the frenzied climax. Calling on his listeners to assent to total war, Goebbels rhetorically asked them to affirm their belief in the final victory of the German people. “Do you want a war more total and radical than anything we can even imagine today?”

  “Yes!” came the reply, with wild applause.

  “Are you determined to follow the Führer through thick and thin to victory and are you willing to accept the heaviest personal burdens?”

  At that, the audience rose and shouted, “Führer, command; we follow!”

  “You have given me your answers,” Goebbels replied. “You have told our enemies what they needed to hear.”

  Across the Atlantic, in Washington, D.C., there were also signs of total war. Gone was the timidity of an isolationist America, sitting the war out as the European Allies were swallowed by the Nazi war machine. Gone, too, was the near frenzy defense of the early 1940s, when America was gearing up its “arsenal of democracy.”

  When the Nazi army had crossed into Poland, Washington, D.C., was a city with fifteen thousand outdoor privies and miles of slums with tarpaper shacks. But there were also the stately homes lining the soft hills of Kalorama and the ornate marble facades of government office buildings. On nice days, visitors could still stroll through the grounds of the White House. The gates were only a recent addition, and for years, the White House lawns had been a favorite spot for picnickers. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau initially planned to protect the White House by having the Secret Service pile sandbags at all the entrances and place machine guns at every door. Every staff member was also issued a gas mask; the president dutifully hung his from his wheelchair.

  In consultation with the British, after the Japanese attack, the White House architect oversaw the construction of a bomb shelter with a tunnel to the East Wing and the Treasury Department. It was designed to withstand a five-hundred-pound bomb, and it had diesel engines to generate electricity and supply filtered air. Antiaircraft guns were also hauled up to the roofs of government buildings. But there was a hitch. The army was so short of antiaircraft weaponry that military planners decided to install mainly replicas made of painted wood. As for the few real guns on the rooftops? Only after the war was it discovered that the ammunition stacked up beside them was the wrong size. Unlike Berlin, Washington was not a city ready to shoot a damaging flak into the sky or to direct a counterassault from a bunker at the zoo. In any case, there was no need for all this: an ocean away from the conflict, Washington was safe and had always been safe. Yet by 1943, it was nonetheless a city transformed.

  As during the Civil War, life in the capital continued largely uninterrupted. True, there were shortages and ration cards, and boys were shipped off to war. But schools remained open and so did offices; football and rugby games were played; picnics were held; movies arrived regularly in theaters; and the only visible rubble was from the monstrous construction projects engulfing the city and its environs.

  The greatest transformation took place across the Potomac, just beyond Arlington National Cemetery, where the Pentagon had been built by an engineer who had overseen the construction of New York City’s La Guardia Airport. To erect the five-sided behemoth as many as thirteen thousand men worked around the clock. Three hundred architects alone had space in a large abandoned aircraft hangar—they had to prepare the designs fast enough to keep up with the builders, who frequently came by and snatched unfinished plans straight from the drafting tables. By early 1943, the Pentagon was complete. It was at the time the largest building in the world, designed to hold forty thousand people and all their accompanying files, phones, typewriters, and every other instrument of bureaucratic war. And on the first day, it was still too small. The military continued to utilize other office space across the river in Washington.

  The city itself was growing fast. The sidewalks were crowded with marines and sailors, and the United States was spending $300,000 a day on the war. Temporary office buildings lined the National Mall, which soon resembled a trailer park. And more than fifty thousand people arrived in the city each year, most looking for jobs. It was also crowded. Traffic was abysmal, housing even more so. Government workers actually slept in shifts in the rooms that they shared. And many lived in real trailer parks lining roads like U.S. Route One. It was a city running on grit and improvisation; it was disorderly and chaotic, and yet it was emerging as the most powerful capital on earth and the place that would take the lead in winning the war. But not quite yet.

  Having already struck at the “underbelly” of the Axis in North Africa, the Allies were still not ready to make an all-out attack through northern France, nor would the coming months bring immediate victory. It was increasingly clear, though, that a reversal of the Nazis’ fortunes was coming, and that it would be at once sweeping and, in time, irreversible—or a
t least this seemed clear to many, including the president.

  So it was no surprise when President Roosevelt, making his way to the podium for his annual report to Congress on January 7, 1943, seemed more upbeat than ever. “Last year,” he said, to a cascade of applause, “we stopped” the Japanese. “This year, we intend to advance.” On the European front, he was equally confident: “The Axis powers knew that they must win the war in 1942—or eventually lose everything. I do not need to tell you that our enemies did not win the war in 1942.”

  “I cannot prophecy,” he then intoned. “I cannot tell you when or where the United Nations are going to strike next in Europe. But we are going to strike—and strike hard.” The applause mounted, and Roosevelt continued. This time it was his turn to taunt Hitler. “I cannot tell you whether we are going to hit them in Norway, or through the Low Countries, or in France, or through Sardinia or Sicily, or through the Balkans, or through Poland—or at several points simultaneously.

  “But,” he continued, “we and the British and the Russians will hit them from the air heavily and relentlessly. . . . Yes, the Nazis and the fascists have asked for it” (he paused for emphasis) “and” (another mesmerizing presidential pause) “they—are—going—to—get—it.”

  And more than anything else, Roosevelt felt sure enough of himself to talk about the eventual peace that would follow. “I have been told that this is no time to speak of a better America after the war. I’m told it is a grave error on my part.

  “I dissent.

  “Let us all have confidence, let us redouble our efforts. A tremendous, costly, long enduring task in peace as well as in war is still ahead of us. But, as we face the continuing task, we may know that the state of this nation is good.”

  A WEEK LATER, ROOSEVELT WAS at the Dar-es-Saada villa in liberated Casablanca. The villa was complete with an air-raid shelter, hastily made out of a swimming pool, and security was tight. In the two-story living room, the tall French windows could be covered by sliding steel curtains designed to protect against bullets or shrapnel. An armored division under the command of General George Patton guarded the compound, which was surrounded by barbed wire. And beyond the barbed wire lay an outer ring of antiaircraft batteries.

  Elliott Roosevelt, who had been summoned in advance of his father, recalled being informed that the town of Casablanca itself, only recently taken from the Germans, was still “riddled” with French Fascist spies. The Secret Service, trying to plan for every contingency, had detailed an endurance swimmer to fly in the president’s clipper plane. The idea was that if the plane was shot down at sea, this agent would stay afloat with Roosevelt for as long as possible.

  The original hope had been for a tripartite conference, but Joseph Stalin had demurred because his forces were in the process of a massive counterattack at Stalingrad, which cut the German army in two and trapped some 300,000 Germans. So instead, it was to be Roosevelt and Churchill once again, and Roosevelt had wanted to go someplace warm. The decor of the villa was lavish—the downstairs bedroom reserved for President Roosevelt was, Elliott recalled, “all frills and froufrou, with an adjoining black marble bathtub.” On entering it, the president, gazing around, “whistled.” “All we need is the madam of the house,” he joked.

  What Roosevelt actually got was Churchill, in the adjacent villa, and the usual retinue of military aides, from General Marshall on down. Much of the talk was speculation. The Germans had yet to be completely defeated in North Africa, although that moment was rapidly approaching as the British general Montgomery pushed west across Libya.

  Obstacles, however, remained. German U-Boats still patrolled the Atlantic, and the Soviet Union might still collapse (though such a collapse was far less of a threat than it had been at the start of the German invasion, it was still not beyond the realm of possibility). Ensuring that Lend-Lease matériel reached the Soviets was a priority. Given these realities, Roosevelt’s promise to the Soviets of a second European front was clearly impossible in 1943. The only time for an attack was summer, and on the military calendar, the relevant dates were fast approaching. As of now, there was no logistical base to support an invasion, and the beleaguered German Luftwaffe was still a presence in the skies. For his part, Dwight Eisenhower, having just undertaken the North African landings, reluctantly stressed that an assault force for the continent could not be readied until the following year, 1944; there were still too many inefficiencies in the Allies’ shipping.

  As the military talks progressed, it became clear that any immediate invasion of France was a long shot, if not a pipe dream. What to do? They discussed the other possible point of attack in the Mediterranean. Here, the British pushed for an invasion of Sicily. They argued that it would open up the shipping lanes and prod Italy out of the war, and that, with forces already positioned in North Africa, such an attack could be accomplished quickly. Marshall, a strong proponent of a second front in France, still held out for some buildup toward a cross-Channel invasion. However Roosevelt agreed with Churchill: the next objective would be Sicily. And the invasion would happen that year.

  Once more, the British, led by Churchill, had won Roosevelt over. As Eisenhower would recall, Churchill “used humor and pathos with equal facility, and drew on everything from the Greek classics to Donald Duck for quotation, cliché and forceful slang to support his position.” Still, Roosevelt, as always, was aware of his delicate position between Churchill and Stalin, and was always calculating what was needed at any moment and what might give him the upper hand. By choosing Sicily and forgoing a second front in Europe, “We have been forced into a strategic compromise which will most certainly offend the Russians,” he mused, adding, “so that later we will be able to force a compromise which will most certainly offend the British.”

  Roosevelt then wanted to see the troops, the men fighting and dying for democracy, but his generals vetoed a visit to the front lines. Instead he traveled eighty-five miles by jeep to see the troops at Rabat, noting on his return, “Once in a jeep is enough to last quite a time.” The president also hosted the ninety-year-old grand vizier of Morocco and the nine-year-old sultan. The grand vizier arrived bearing gifts; a gold dagger for Roosevelt and two gold bracelets and a towering tiara for the first lady. Roosevelt winked at his son the moment he spotted the tiara. “We could both picture her presiding at the White House with that doodad on her head,” Elliott noted wryly. In return, as his gift, Roosevelt presented the grand vizier with a framed photo of himself.

  Over dinner, in French, Roosevelt began formulating his idea of a Moroccan New Deal. He proposed to the grand vizier that there should be plans for developing local natural resources—phosphates, cobalt, manganese ore, and oil—and then using a significant portion of the resulting revenue to raise local standards of living. Roosevelt even suggested that Moroccans could come to study at American universities, and that American firms might be hired to start the development projects.

  The climax of the summit was to be the tricky question of French politics. There was a controversial joint photography session with the two rivals for the leadership of the French government in exile; Charles de Gaulle, the symbol of the Resistance; and General Henri-Honoré Giraud, the North African compromise leader. But it was at the conclusion of this ceremony that the real sparks flew. Roosevelt and Churchill met with reporters on the lawn at Casablanca. The president, after referring to the venerated Civil War general U.S. Grant, whose initials were often said to mean “unconditional surrender,” uttered one controversial sentence: “The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan.”

  Once these words were spoken, there was no turning back. Unconditional surrender became the guiding precept for the remainder of the war.

  Debate has raged ever since whether this was a statement made spontaneously by Roosevelt in the heat of the moment, or whether it was a result of discussion and deliberation, an evolving strategy designed in large meas
ure to reassure Stalin and to boost the Allies’ morale. Actually, Churchill was aghast. There was a distinct possibility that this demand for “unconditional surrender” would prolong the war by hardening the Axis opposition and snuffing out those who might push for a quicker, more flexible negotiated peace.

  But this was almost an academic question. For Adolf Hitler in Berlin, “surrender” was not an option. He continued to believe only in unconditional victory.

  ALTHOUGH THE GERMAN FRONTS were crumbling, never had his belief been stronger. The enraged Führer, intoxicated more by illusion than by fact, was now driving his generals to despair. In his mind, the war was still at the Nazis’ high-water mark of October 1942, when he had commanded more of Europe than any leader since Napoleon. In the east, his veteran troops had reigned over vast swaths of Soviet territory, advancing to within forty miles of Moscow. In the west, he reigned over the crown jewel of Europe, northern France, including Paris. In the southeast, he had secured the tallest peak of the Caucasus, Mount Elbrus. To the south, the Mediterranean remained within his iron vise. In the north, Sweden was marginalized while Norway was still governed by the jackboot. Except for some swarms of unruly guerrillas, the Balkans were also part of the Third Reich. And in North Africa, all he had to do was give the word, and Rommel would push on to Alexandria and the Suez Canal.